Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Big Picture

I'm trying to think of how to present the Imperium (and the rest of the Official Traveller Universe) in this campaign. The thing is that a huge, millennium-old Imperium probably means a lot of military and administrative budgets and naval capabilities, and thus a very big nose to poke into backwater places such as the Outrim Void. I'd prefer the Imperial involvement to be more limited, as given in CT's A4: Leviathan, where a single 1,200-ton Kinunir-class cruiser and two 300-ton Gazelle-class cruisers would be considered a whole "task force", rather having a squadron of several multi-K-ton battleships roving around Pax Ruling and Egryn and making the Belgardian (for example) far less of a threat.

The possibilities I'm toying with are:

1) Be vague about it. The main player, my spouse, is pretty much new to Traveller, so I can present the OTU to her in a less canonical manner. I probably can avoid giving a whole overview map beyond the local quadrant or so, and hint at a Proto-Traveller-sized Imperium (very big, but not THAT HUGE).

2) A proto-Traveller map such as this:

This essentially means using a smaller Imperium, with the entire OTU filling a 4x5 sector grid. The spinward side of Core and Diaspora will contain the Rift, and there would be some frontier sectors around this map (such as rimward of the Solomani Rim). The advantage is that things are kept at a more manageable scale. The disadvantage is that it looks a bit... uncomfortable to me in terms of spatial relations between the various sectors.

3) "Shrink" the OTU, so that eachsector becomes a subsector, such as this:A few subsectors were moved, removed or merged to create a more coherent overall setting. In total it will be composed of four sectors, named Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta and centered around Capital. This way I can keep most interesting words while getting rid of the various repetitive "filler" worlds.

The main problem with this approach is that it will mean merging Egryn with Pax Rulin, losing some of its worlds and placing it only a few jumps away from the core of the Marches. I'm not sure if this will work well for this kind of a sandbox...